Giving credit where it’s due...

Posted
Wednesday, September 21, 2016 5:51 pm

Marshall Helmberger

It’s sometimes funny how the mind works. For me, it’s usually in the middle of the night, while half asleep, that those nagging little doubts that I manage to suppress during the day, when I’m distracted by a hundred other things, suddenly find their way to the surface.

I notice this most often in the wee hours on Thursdays, mere hours after we’ve sent another week’s edition to the printing plant. That’s when it dawns on me that I forgot to make a needed change in a story, or misspelled somebody’s name. Two weeks ago, it was my column, “Saying goodbye to our most faithful friends,” that got me up with a start. It was 3 a.m. when the old memory banks finally disgorged the recollection that it was, in fact, not Jack London who wrote the famous epic, “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” but rather Robert W. Service.

I woke up on the spot, wandered downstairs in my underwear and made the correction in our online version. I told my wife Jodi when we she woke up the next morning that I was going to be in for some grief from at least a few alert readers who I figured would certainly catch the error.

But lo and behold, if any of our dear readers did wonder, no one called me on it. In other words, I probably could have snuck one by— but I’m giving you the true tale anyway. So, my apologies to all of you, and, perhaps, most of all, to Robert Service, whose name, unlike Jack London’s, seems to have faded, undeservedly, from our collective memories.

And for those who haven’t thought of this evocative poem in many years, or who have never laid eyes on it before, I am reproducing it here for your enjoyment and edification. So here it is, one of my all-time favorites, from Robert W. Service:

The Cremation of Sam McGee

“There are strange things done

in the midnight sun

By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

That would make your blood run cold;

The Northern Lights have seen

queer sights,

But the queerest they ever did see

Was that night on the marge of

Lake Lebarge

I cremated Sam McGee.

“Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.

Why he left his home in the South to roam ‘round the Pole, God only knows.

He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;

Though he’d often say in his homely way that “he’d sooner live in hell.”

“On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail.

Talk of your cold! through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail.